A computer method of gathering and summarizing large amounts of information comprises collecting information from a plurality of information sources (14, 51) according to respective maps (52) of the information sources (14), converting the collected information from a storage format to XML-language documents (26, 53) and storing the XML-language documents in a storage medium, searching for documents (55) according to a search query (13) having at least one term and identifying the documents (26) found in the search, and displaying the documents as nodes (33) of a tree structure (32) having links (34) and nodes (33) so as to indicate similarity of the documents to each other.

STATEMENT REGARDING FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH
This invention was made with Government support under Interagency Agreement No. 2302-Q326-A1 with the Office of Naval Research. Additional support has been provided under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 awarded to UT-Battelle, LLC, by the U.S. Department of Energy. The Government has certain rights in this invention.